Outside on the landing there is water, and a rough sink, which the tenants of each floor use in common. They have to go into the hall to fetch every drop of water they use, and this is the only place they have to empty the dirty water away.
In some houses the sinks are not on every floor, and in these, the poor women have to drag their heavy buckets of water up and down the stairs.
The tenements are not heated. Each tenant has to keep his own rooms warm.
Every drop of warm water they need for cooking or washing has first to be boiled over the stove, and so the poor are forced to use a great deal more coal than more well-to-do people need.
It is not because they don't pay the landlords enough rent that the poor have no comforts in their homes. So many families can be packed into one floor, that landlords find tenement-houses pay them extremely well.
Many of the tenement-houses have been allowed to get so dilapidated, that the Board of Health has taken the matter in hand, and has been trying to make the landlord have them properly drained, and cleaned, and repaired.
It came to the knowledge of this board that there were some rear tenements in Mott Street, which were in a frightful condition.
They had been built at the back of some houses fronting on Mott Street—in fact, they had been put in the little spot of ground that had been the yard belonging to the front houses.
They came up so close to the front buildings that, by stretching out your arms, you could almost touch the front wall of one house and the back wall of the other. The actual distance apart was a little over seven feet.
This would have been bad enough, but worse was to come. After a time, warehouses were built over the surrounding back yards, and at last these poor tenements had brick walls round their sides and backs, to within eight inches of the windows, and all the light they got was given them by the seven-foot court that divided them from the houses in front.